How Equality Leads to War

2024.03.23

The notion that equality inevitably leads to war is perplexing for many. Such an idea seems so counter to our understanding of equality that has persisted since the time of the American and French Revolutions.

The United States Declaration of Independence begins with the famous line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and it goes on to spell out how that natural equality not only translates into the political rights of citizens, but also how it underwrites the authority of any government instituted to secure those rights.

Inspired by America’s founding fathers, the Revolutionary government of France’s Constituent Assembly published their principles for a new republic in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789. The very first article states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The French Declaration, like that of the Americans, details how natural equality is the foundation for a system of legal and political rights, “[The law] must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.”

This idea of a natural equality of all citizens as the basis for political freedom, legal rights, and legitimate governance has since become so deeply ingrained in Western political philosophy that any other interpretation of equality is immediately suspect in contemporary liberal democratic states. However, there is an older and darker interpretation that is both conceptually and chronologically prior to these “revolutionary” articulations of natural equality.

Thomas Hobbes, writing more than a century before the American Revolution, would have agreed with the American and French Declarations that the natural state of man conferred upon all people an equality that is universal – but for Hobbes that equality was an inescapable burden of paranoia and violence, not a universalizing source of political fraternity. He articulates this view in the dense and difficult paragraph that opens chapter thirteen of his classic treatise, Leviathan (published in 1651):

“Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.”

And here is my own modernized version of Hobbes’ language:

“Nature has made people quite equal in their mental and physical capacities. Though we may often find one who is stronger or smarter than another, the differences are never so great that anyone can claim to have absolute advantage over all others. This is especially true of physical strength, for the weakest man is usually still strong enough to kill the strongest, whether through a secret plot or alliance with others.”

In what follows, I shall unpack this basic articulation of Hobbes’ theory of natural equality to show how it delineates the fundamental causes of war.